20 ms·

I've tried (and failed) to delete my Facebook a couple times in the past, so this most recent go, when I quit using Facebook, I just quit using Facebook -- I un

I've tried (and failed) to delete my Facebook a couple times in the past, so this most recent go, when I quit using Facebook, I just quit using Facebook -- I uninstalled the apps from my phone, and mapped 'facebook.com' to localhost in my /etc/hosts files. The result was... amusing. Facebook kept emailing me the "Hey, did you see what so and so posted?" emails, knowing full well that I didn't see them. But then, after that, I started getting weekly reminders that "You haven't updated your timeline in a week". Facebook, ever the clingy ex-girlfriend it is, seemed to start amping up the frequency of the emails the more I neglected them, so I started just marking them as spam. Two blissful days went by in which Facebook wasn't a distraction, but then they shifted from email to SMS which, as an Android/Hangouts user, was even more annoying, since now I have to engage in multiple steps to delete. They really, really want me to use their service.

yeukhon 9y ago
I don’t see why that isn’t expected. Next time try deactivate it instead of uninstall the app, then there is an option to opt out communication. In your account settings, you can also opt out. I have not received a single email from facebook since then (although I am back on it again).
- bmelton 9y ago
  I did not expect them to ramp up the amount of notification spam 100-fold as I engage with the service less. I've no intention of logging back in to check my notification settings, but when I was using Facebook, I would get a push notification maybe once or twice every couple of days. Now, I get more than a dozen SMS messages a day. I've built notification systems in the past, and in every instance, respecting the fact that abusing the notification power entrusted to us by our customers was seen as a cardinal sin. Maybe it's the absence of that respect that has catapulted Facebook to where it is, or the presence of it that's held me back in my own endeavors, I don't know, but man, as the recipient of all this spam, it really, really feels unsavory, and further evaporates whatever trust I might have had in the platform.
  - yeukhon 9y ago
    Hmm that is odd. I get the phone notification because I had thst problem if I didn’t remove the app and if I haven’t been on facebook for more than a day. I think the “user is idle let’s poke the user” is a supposedly a “nice” user engagement to get users back on the system. I hear your concern. I think at this point: * opt out notifications before deactivate your account (go to account settings) * deactivate and opt-out notification at the time of deactivation * set facebook email as spam or something (although you’d miss any potential real security notifications.) Or you can also remove your phone number and change the account’s email address. I own a dozen gmail accounts, one for mailing list, one for billing, one for personal, one for school, one for important tech accounts like digital ocean/aws, one for banks, one for general garabge I don’t care and so on. I also run a YouTube channel with a friend so I also own a separate gmail account to be added as a manager of the channel. Much neater than labels (amazon emails can fuck me up easily, ugh). I highly recommend this multi-email account approach. I can ignore 50 emails sitting in other accounts most of the time. All of them have second auth and some accounts have different passwords for additional security. Not hard to manage because the address format is always <A>.<purpose>@gmail.com. Consistency!!
    - avh02 9y ago
      Sounds like you could benefit (to some extent except ignoring certain inboxes) from a custom email domain and enabling catch-all. I use this in order to segregate people(services mainly) sending me emails to different addresses that I don't have to manually create (but can easily block/disable an entire address) The only major issue I've had, with gsuite at least, is not being able to reply from one of the not-actually-existent addresses on my domain.
      - Chaebixi 9y ago
        Try Fastmail. If you want to reply you can setup a sending identity with the necessary email address. You don't have to do anything ahead of time.
        9y ago
dnel 9y ago
I deactivated first for about 6 months, didn't get any communication from them. Eventually I went to delete and used a link from deletefacebook.com taking me straight to the right page. Maybe it was because I was on mobile but there wasn't any emotional blackmail begging me to stay and it was done. I was expecting much worse but the experience was quite smooth for me and I'm happily free of Facebook for good now.
- mezuzi 9y ago
  Enjoy real life!! In the months I had no Facebook, life was amazing and I was more productive, though a bit lonely mainly because I live in a foreign country adn my family is thousands of miles away.
  - dnel 9y ago
    Both of my siblings live abroad but I stay in touch through messaging. Facebook always made me feel my relationships there were shallow, and many people I regularly interacted with never followed up off-site. For me this is a good thing. Pruning false relationships frees up time to invest properly in those relationships that really matter. Facebook gets in the way of social relationships, you can't see who really matters while you're distracted talking to people you'll probably never meet again. Quality > Quantity every time.
- ballenf 9y ago
  Psychological lesson in that: The best advice I've ever read for the spouse who is on the receiving end of a divorce request/demand and wishes for reparation is to acquiesce quickly and approach the ordeal as a business transaction. You'll find story after story of anecdotes of that working to allow a couple to repair relations and figure out what was broken. Much better than being very emotional and otherwise reinforcing the reasons for the divorce request in the first place. I think FB is being wise in taking this approach considering how difficult it is to find the real "delete" as opposed to "pause" button. That's a lesson I've applied to many areas of business to very good outcomes -- customers wishing to terminate, etc.
- eighthnate 9y ago
geomark 9y ago
It's so humorous. I never managed to activate my Facebook account (lucky me). Some "database error", or so it says. So I have never actually even logged in. But they do have an email address I used when I tried to create an account and it gets multiple emails per week with friend recommendations. They all get routed to my spam folder.
Evgeny 9y ago
It is fairly easy to configure Facebook notifications the way you want them to be (for example, I want to know when someone logs into my account, but nothing else). I post on my timeline less than once a month, and receive no notifications. Not to defend Facebook, but notifications are hardly its biggest annoyance.
- MRSallee 9y ago
  My email preferences have everything disabled, double triple and quadruple checked to make sure, and I still occasionally get an email about one of my FB friends uploading a photo or some shit that is certainly (a) described by the settings as email I should not receive, and (b) not even what a notification should be. “A person with whom you’ve never interacted aside from accepting a friend request said something not about you on their own timeline.” ???
- Chaebixi 9y ago
  This is not true. They offer no fine-grained control besides dicking around with dozens of unsubscribe links over several weeks. For instance, how do you easily configure Facebook to ONLY send you emails when you're invited to an event or someone sends you a Facebook message, but NOT when your friends post random stuff?
  - Evgeny 9y ago
    I have to agree on the no fine-grained control. My point was that it is easy to opt out of the notifications by email in general. I'm positive that there is an option where you receive a notification when someone send you a message, but I don't think it is possible to get event invitation notifications only.
_jal 9y ago
I set one up with my primary email address probably 10 years ago just to block someone else doing it. I keep their IP space blocked on my local network (but not my mail server - I try to be a good netizen). I have probably seen a facebook.com page three or four times since then - misclicks at work, etc. And never while 'logged in'[1]. I still get an endless stream of spam from them. "Facebook - more AOL than AOL ever was." [1] whatever that means, wrt them.
- 659087 9y ago
  > (but not my mail server - I try to be a good netizen) Blocking sources of spam is part of being a "good netizen".
  - _jal 9y ago
    Being reachable by other admins is what I was referring to[1]. I do aggressively block pure-spam hosts, of course, but I can't consider FB one of those. [1] I find it exceedingly unlikely that FB mail admins would need to reach me to troubleshoot something, but it is the principle.
imustbeevil 9y ago
This is such a weird thing to think. You can turn off all notifications and they'll never contact you, ever. I stopped using Facebook 6 years ago and haven't gotten a single email / sms from them since then, because I used the settings properly. Yeah, if you just ghost them and never click "update your email settings" at the bottom of every email they send, they'll keep sending them.
- mcny 9y ago
  If you think that is weird, consider what I have done. I manually went through 1100+ friends on facebook and unfollowed them all because facebook won't show me everything in the activity feed but rather tries to guess what I like best. My activity feed is now perfect because it is pretty much just me.
  - volkk 9y ago
    Yep--that's certainly weirder.
    - mcny 9y ago
      Yup, in an attempt to avoid falling into Facebook's echo chamber I have created a news feed that is funnily enough just my posts. At least this means I don't have any incentive to look at my news feed anymore.
  - godelski 9y ago
    Funny thing, I used to use Facebook for messenger and a news feed. Then they switched to this whole thing about forcing friends posts to come up first. Unfortunately this means now I get news I'm not interested in (memes, my grandma's crazy internet news, conspiracy theories from that guy I went to high school but have had 0 interaction on facebook with, etc). I also unfollow people that post crazy stuff and I keep getting their content. I've been trying to find that feed that you have, but good lord does facebook not want me to have it.
- lkrubner 9y ago
  An earlier story: "Facebook activated my dormant account and it won’t let me deactivate it" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13965134 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13965134
marcosscriven 9y ago
I get a monthly email from Facebook entitled "Help your friends recognize you". I think my friends recognize me thank you very much Facebook, otherwise they're not, you know, my actual friends?
Romanulus 9y ago
They really, really want you to be their product.
zokier 9y ago
I'm not sure why the emails are a big deal; they are pretty much trivial to filter out. Marking them as spam is probably not helpful in the bigger picture. I just let them accumulate in their own folder in gmail, they don't hurt anyone there.
ryandrake 9y ago
I removed everything from my account about 6 or so years ago, and instead of deleting it just stopped logging in completely. So far not a single E-mail from them. I'm afraid to log back in even if to simply delete the account, because I don't want to "tickle the tiger" and suddenly start being treated as a user... Same for Twitter. I signed up once a long, long time ago, and maybe tweeted once and never logged in again. Occasionally I get E-mails from them about people (bots?) who "follow" me despite my inactivity. It's likely because my twitter handle is pretty short and an actual name, so probably some people get confused and follow the wrong person.
collyw 9y ago
I got similar crap from them after two and a half weeks in Africa on holiday a year ago, because the internet so slow it wasn't worth checking Facebook. Recently I have been busy with a new job, started meditating and reading my Kindle rather than a backlit screen. I use Facebook maybe 15% compared to a month ago. Life feels a bit better better as a result. Kind of like giving up smoking, or cutting down. It's just mental clutter.

yeukhon 9y ago

I don’t see why that isn’t expected. Next time try deactivate it instead of uninstall the app, then there is an option to opt out communication. In your account settings, you can also opt out. I have not received a single email from facebook since then (although I am back on it again).

bmelton 9y ago
I did not expect them to ramp up the amount of notification spam 100-fold as I engage with the service less. I've no intention of logging back in to check my notification settings, but when I was using Facebook, I would get a push notification maybe once or twice every couple of days. Now, I get more than a dozen SMS messages a day. I've built notification systems in the past, and in every instance, respecting the fact that abusing the notification power entrusted to us by our customers was seen as a cardinal sin. Maybe it's the absence of that respect that has catapulted Facebook to where it is, or the presence of it that's held me back in my own endeavors, I don't know, but man, as the recipient of all this spam, it really, really feels unsavory, and further evaporates whatever trust I might have had in the platform.
- yeukhon 9y ago
  Hmm that is odd. I get the phone notification because I had thst problem if I didn’t remove the app and if I haven’t been on facebook for more than a day. I think the “user is idle let’s poke the user” is a supposedly a “nice” user engagement to get users back on the system. I hear your concern. I think at this point: * opt out notifications before deactivate your account (go to account settings) * deactivate and opt-out notification at the time of deactivation * set facebook email as spam or something (although you’d miss any potential real security notifications.) Or you can also remove your phone number and change the account’s email address. I own a dozen gmail accounts, one for mailing list, one for billing, one for personal, one for school, one for important tech accounts like digital ocean/aws, one for banks, one for general garabge I don’t care and so on. I also run a YouTube channel with a friend so I also own a separate gmail account to be added as a manager of the channel. Much neater than labels (amazon emails can fuck me up easily, ugh). I highly recommend this multi-email account approach. I can ignore 50 emails sitting in other accounts most of the time. All of them have second auth and some accounts have different passwords for additional security. Not hard to manage because the address format is always <A>.<purpose>@gmail.com. Consistency!!
  - avh02 9y ago
    Sounds like you could benefit (to some extent except ignoring certain inboxes) from a custom email domain and enabling catch-all. I use this in order to segregate people(services mainly) sending me emails to different addresses that I don't have to manually create (but can easily block/disable an entire address) The only major issue I've had, with gsuite at least, is not being able to reply from one of the not-actually-existent addresses on my domain.
    - Chaebixi 9y ago
      Try Fastmail. If you want to reply you can setup a sending identity with the necessary email address. You don't have to do anything ahead of time.
      - 9y ago

dnel 9y ago

I deactivated first for about 6 months, didn't get any communication from them. Eventually I went to delete and used a link from deletefacebook.com taking me straight to the right page. Maybe it was because I was on mobile but there wasn't any emotional blackmail begging me to stay and it was done. I was expecting much worse but the experience was quite smooth for me and I'm happily free of Facebook for good now.

mezuzi 9y ago
Enjoy real life!! In the months I had no Facebook, life was amazing and I was more productive, though a bit lonely mainly because I live in a foreign country adn my family is thousands of miles away.
- dnel 9y ago
  Both of my siblings live abroad but I stay in touch through messaging. Facebook always made me feel my relationships there were shallow, and many people I regularly interacted with never followed up off-site. For me this is a good thing. Pruning false relationships frees up time to invest properly in those relationships that really matter. Facebook gets in the way of social relationships, you can't see who really matters while you're distracted talking to people you'll probably never meet again. Quality > Quantity every time.
ballenf 9y ago
Psychological lesson in that: The best advice I've ever read for the spouse who is on the receiving end of a divorce request/demand and wishes for reparation is to acquiesce quickly and approach the ordeal as a business transaction. You'll find story after story of anecdotes of that working to allow a couple to repair relations and figure out what was broken. Much better than being very emotional and otherwise reinforcing the reasons for the divorce request in the first place. I think FB is being wise in taking this approach considering how difficult it is to find the real "delete" as opposed to "pause" button. That's a lesson I've applied to many areas of business to very good outcomes -- customers wishing to terminate, etc.
eighthnate 9y ago

geomark 9y ago

It's so humorous. I never managed to activate my Facebook account (lucky me). Some "database error", or so it says. So I have never actually even logged in. But they do have an email address I used when I tried to create an account and it gets multiple emails per week with friend recommendations. They all get routed to my spam folder.

Evgeny 9y ago

It is fairly easy to configure Facebook notifications the way you want them to be (for example, I want to know when someone logs into my account, but nothing else). I post on my timeline less than once a month, and receive no notifications. Not to defend Facebook, but notifications are hardly its biggest annoyance.

MRSallee 9y ago
My email preferences have everything disabled, double triple and quadruple checked to make sure, and I still occasionally get an email about one of my FB friends uploading a photo or some shit that is certainly (a) described by the settings as email I should not receive, and (b) not even what a notification should be. “A person with whom you’ve never interacted aside from accepting a friend request said something not about you on their own timeline.” ???
Chaebixi 9y ago
This is not true. They offer no fine-grained control besides dicking around with dozens of unsubscribe links over several weeks. For instance, how do you easily configure Facebook to ONLY send you emails when you're invited to an event or someone sends you a Facebook message, but NOT when your friends post random stuff?
- Evgeny 9y ago
  I have to agree on the no fine-grained control. My point was that it is easy to opt out of the notifications by email in general. I'm positive that there is an option where you receive a notification when someone send you a message, but I don't think it is possible to get event invitation notifications only.

_jal 9y ago

I set one up with my primary email address probably 10 years ago just to block someone else doing it. I keep their IP space blocked on my local network (but not my mail server - I try to be a good netizen). I have probably seen a facebook.com page three or four times since then - misclicks at work, etc. And never while 'logged in'[1]. I still get an endless stream of spam from them. "Facebook - more AOL than AOL ever was." [1] whatever that means, wrt them.

659087 9y ago
> (but not my mail server - I try to be a good netizen) Blocking sources of spam is part of being a "good netizen".
- _jal 9y ago
  Being reachable by other admins is what I was referring to[1]. I do aggressively block pure-spam hosts, of course, but I can't consider FB one of those. [1] I find it exceedingly unlikely that FB mail admins would need to reach me to troubleshoot something, but it is the principle.

imustbeevil 9y ago

This is such a weird thing to think. You can turn off all notifications and they'll never contact you, ever. I stopped using Facebook 6 years ago and haven't gotten a single email / sms from them since then, because I used the settings properly. Yeah, if you just ghost them and never click "update your email settings" at the bottom of every email they send, they'll keep sending them.

mcny 9y ago
If you think that is weird, consider what I have done. I manually went through 1100+ friends on facebook and unfollowed them all because facebook won't show me everything in the activity feed but rather tries to guess what I like best. My activity feed is now perfect because it is pretty much just me.
- volkk 9y ago
  Yep--that's certainly weirder.
  - mcny 9y ago
    Yup, in an attempt to avoid falling into Facebook's echo chamber I have created a news feed that is funnily enough just my posts. At least this means I don't have any incentive to look at my news feed anymore.
- godelski 9y ago
  Funny thing, I used to use Facebook for messenger and a news feed. Then they switched to this whole thing about forcing friends posts to come up first. Unfortunately this means now I get news I'm not interested in (memes, my grandma's crazy internet news, conspiracy theories from that guy I went to high school but have had 0 interaction on facebook with, etc). I also unfollow people that post crazy stuff and I keep getting their content. I've been trying to find that feed that you have, but good lord does facebook not want me to have it.
lkrubner 9y ago
An earlier story: "Facebook activated my dormant account and it won’t let me deactivate it" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13965134 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13965134

marcosscriven 9y ago

I get a monthly email from Facebook entitled "Help your friends recognize you". I think my friends recognize me thank you very much Facebook, otherwise they're not, you know, my actual friends?

Romanulus 9y ago

They really, really want you to be their product.

zokier 9y ago

I'm not sure why the emails are a big deal; they are pretty much trivial to filter out. Marking them as spam is probably not helpful in the bigger picture. I just let them accumulate in their own folder in gmail, they don't hurt anyone there.

ryandrake 9y ago

I removed everything from my account about 6 or so years ago, and instead of deleting it just stopped logging in completely. So far not a single E-mail from them. I'm afraid to log back in even if to simply delete the account, because I don't want to "tickle the tiger" and suddenly start being treated as a user... Same for Twitter. I signed up once a long, long time ago, and maybe tweeted once and never logged in again. Occasionally I get E-mails from them about people (bots?) who "follow" me despite my inactivity. It's likely because my twitter handle is pretty short and an actual name, so probably some people get confused and follow the wrong person.

collyw 9y ago

I got similar crap from them after two and a half weeks in Africa on holiday a year ago, because the internet so slow it wasn't worth checking Facebook. Recently I have been busy with a new job, started meditating and reading my Kindle rather than a backlit screen. I use Facebook maybe 15% compared to a month ago. Life feels a bit better better as a result. Kind of like giving up smoking, or cutting down. It's just mental clutter.